


Back to the Future

by SoloMoon



Series: Eleutherophobia [8]
Category: Animorphs (TV), Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: AU: Tom survives, Aftermath of yeerk infestation, Gen, Teenage-boy-typical levels of profanity, Tom Berenson POV, Victim Blaming, well-intentioned but shitty parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-26
Updated: 2017-10-10
Packaged: 2019-01-05 09:24:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12187302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SoloMoon/pseuds/SoloMoon
Summary: Someone decided to get the entire extended Berenson family together for some reason (i.e. tradition!) and now there are over twenty of these crazy people in one house at one time, three months after the end of the war.  Tom, for one, is pretty sure he's not going to get through the day without stabbing someone.





	1. Consanguineous

**Author's Note:**

> Set about three months after Day the Earth Stood Still (i.e. one week after Akira, during Ghost in the Shell), but these fics can be read in any order or alone.
> 
> Based on word of god, canon clues, and my own educated guesses, the character ages at the end of the war are as follows: Tom would be 19, Saddler would be 18, Rachel would be 17, Jake is 16, Justin is 14, Jordan is 14, Brooke is 9, Sarah is 8, and Forrest is 6.
> 
> Written to the sounds of [ "Inside Out" by Eve 6. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8Xb_7YDroQ)

I used to hate family reunions as a kid.  They would happen every summer, and every time they followed the same routine: the adults would all convene on the back porch with glasses of Long Island iced tea and boxes of poker chips, the younger kids would all go running to play in the sprinkler in Aunt Naomi's backyard, and I would get stuck babysitting.  Every.  Single.  Time.  Starting when I was nine, going up to when I was seventeen.

Not being that old or responsible myself at the time, I would usually order Jake not to cause trouble and run off on my own, either to shoot baskets in the tiny hoop they had nailed above the garage door or to find a quiet place to read.  What happened as soon as I left was as regular as clockwork: Saddler would start harassing one of the younger kids, Jake would tell him to cut it out, Saddler would start beating up Jake instead, Rachel would either decide that Jake needed defending or that any fight was worth having and start attacking Saddler, and I would have to come running back over to wade in and pull them all apart.  The only aspect of the whole scene that varied from year to year was whether Saddler decided to tattle, which, when it happened, usually resulted in Aunt Ellen yelling at Rachel while my own parents yelled at me for not keeping a closer eye on them, as if I'd had anything to do with anything.

After the drama of the scene ended and the adults once again determined that Rachel had not yet succeeded in permanently damaging Saddler, and that Saddler had not done anything to Jake that Jake couldn't shrug off with an eight-year-old’s version of stoicism, they would go back inside.  And then just as I'd be making my exit, Saddler (pissed off about being beaten up by a girl) would decide to take out his feelings by punching Jordan.  And the whole cycle would start again.

At least it always tended to make me deeply grateful that for most of the rest of the year I only had one younger sibling to watch, and that he was always pretty good at taking care of himself.  Silver linings, right?

The year after I turned sixteen, I don't really remember what happened.  I'd had a yeerk in my head for less than a month at that point, and I missed a lot, still too busy fighting back in the foolish hope that if I just tried hard enough I'd be able to force my way past Temrash 114's control long enough to tell someone what was happening.  There was no reunion the next year, because that was the summer Saddler was killed and no one felt like assembling for watermelon and ongoing in-jokes in the immediate aftermath.  The year after that, both Jake and I were struck with sudden bouts of academic piety and separately tried to bow out to work on summer reading.  Our parents weren’t fooled, and we both ended up going that year anyway.

There would be no ducking out of it this year, for either one of us, because Mom had decided it was going to happen at our house this time around.  Sure, the idea made sense in theory—our house was far enough away from the center of Santa Barbara that it had survived the destruction of the Yeerk Pool, unlike Aunt Naomi's, and it was centrally located, unlike Aunt Ellen's.  But after a few hours of watching Jake fidget like he was waiting for his own execution and cast longing glances outside at the perfect flying weather, I wished that it was pretty much anywhere but here.

My parents were more than a little nervous as well.  They’d woken up at 5:30 in the morning the day before yesterday to start cleaning, and I wasn't sure either one of them had stopped to eat or sleep since.  They had even forced me to straighten up my room, even though there was no logical reason why the party would ever leave the first floor.  (They had tried to do the same thing with Jake, who had just stared at Mom for a few seconds like he really wanted to understand what she was saying but couldn't figure out which language she was using.  Then he’d walked back into his room, shut the door, and refused to come out for the rest of the day.)  I put my foot down, however, when Dad told me the morning of the reunion to go alphabetize the CD rack in the living room.

"Dad," I said slowly.  "We are related to these people.  Most of them have known us our whole lives.  I'm almost positive that they've already formed whatever opinions they're going to have of us, and that even scattering CDs all over the floor and letting everyone trip over them won't do much to change those opinions."

“Argue later, clean now,” he said.  “I still need to iron the pillowcases, everyone’s going to be here in less than an hour, and—“

“ _Iron_ the _pillowcases_?” I crossed my arms.  “Dad.  No.  Go sit down, eat some of the perfectly-arranged chips, drink the forty-five degree beer, and pretend just for a second that no one is going to be snooping on the flatness of our pillowcases.  Stop worrying about first impressions, because trust me it is way too late.”

“There’s a difference between wanting to make a good impression and wanting to be a good host,” Dad said in his I-am-not-amused-young-man voice.  “And I think that we owe it to everyone to be good hosts.”

I opened my mouth to make some sarcastic comment about how I’d never been a good host in my life and was offended he’d ever think otherwise—and then gave up, shutting it without saying anything else.  Things were… _different_ , since the war, and apparently this was going to be one of them.  My dad never used to get worked up about anything.  Tended to let Jake and I do whatever we wanted as long as (the way he always put it) neither of us was breaking any laws.  These days, it sometimes felt like a crapshoot about what would set him off and what he would let go without a word.

And here it was: showing everyone in the rest of the family just how very very _fine_ we were all doing was now extremely important for some reason.  One of those things.

“Okay," I said at last. "Sure."  Anything to keep the peace.

Fortunately, Aunt Ellen saved me from having to do any more inane chores by choosing that moment to walk through the front door—without ringing the doorbell—with a towering pile of Tupperware containers clutched in both arms.

“Hey, Steve, thought we’d stop by early to help set up,” she said lightly.

Dad blanched for a half a second but recovered.  “Ellen, sorry the house is a mess—”

I snorted loudly.

“But it’s so good to see you!”  Dad grabbed the top layer of dishes of _stuff_ off her tower before it could end up on the freshly-shampooed carpet.

“Tom, dear, can you go help the kids with the rest of the food in the car?” Aunt Ellen said.

Oh dear lord.  If they’d brought more food than four people could carry in a single trip, then this whole damn day was probably going to end up completely over the top.  And as the only one old enough to have a driver’s license but young enough not to be allowed to drink, I was probably going to end up shuttling everyone home when it was over.

I tried smiling at Aunt Ellen—hopefully it came off as kind of natural looking—and went outside.  The two little ones, Brooke and Forrest, were already out running around in the front yard screaming and throwing things for Homer to go eagerly retrieve.  Justin, who was only a couple years younger than Jake and more mature than the rest of his siblings put together, was carrying more boxes of food from the car to the house.  Uncle George was digging through the trunk to get more stuff out.

Here we went again.

Rather than think too hard, I went out to the car and started unloading stuff as well.

“So are you guys planning on moving in, or just expecting an army to stop by?” I asked Justin as I walked by.

He rolled his eyes.  “Both, probably, listening to my mom.”

I paused on the front porch on my way back, propping a casserole dish against the railing.  “Yeah, my parents have been weird about this whole thing too.”

Justin’s solemn look was too old for his face.  “A lot’s happened, I guess.  I think they all want it to be... I don’t know, perfect.”

I laughed, the sound flat.

“Yeah, that’s totally not going to happen.  Not today, anyway,” Justin said.  

“I guess I can respect them wanting a little normal.”  I watched as Mom came around the house to exchange enthusiastic hugs with Uncle George and exclaim over how much his kids had grown.   “After… everything.  I guess they think it’ll be nice to forget for a while.”

Justin didn't answer, and I felt like an asshole for having spoken.  I hadn't meant I wanted to forget the people our family had lost.  Just...

“Did you really have a yeerk _inside of your brain_?” Justin blurted out before I had the chance to apologize.  He looked a little shocked at himself as soon as he said it.

“No,” I drawled, “I was just going through a strangely homicidal personality phase.”

Justin narrowed his eyes at me.  “You don’t need to be like that.  It was just a question.”

“Yeah, I…” I glanced away.  “Sorry.  It’s kind of a weird thing to talk about.”

“What about…” Justin hesitated.  “I mean, the rest of the family.  Did anyone else…?”  He made a vague motion next to his left ear.

Welcome to the land of paranoia, kiddo.  The rest of us have been happily living here for over three years.

“Both of my parents, near the end of the war,” I said dully.  “Uncle Dan, for a little while there.  That’s it that I know of.”  Mentioning Jake would have probably started off a whole new round of questioning that I wasn’t going to bother with.

“They were the only ones?” Justin pressed.  “You would have known if anyone else… I mean, if anyone in my family was…”

He could be talking about anyone.  Maybe he’d been hoping Saddler had only been in the habit of shoving him around because it was some yeerk in the driver’s seat.  Maybe his mom acted weird.  Who knew.

And the thing was, any of them could have been a controller and I wouldn’t have necessarily known.  Not if Essa 412 never bothered to find out.  If whoever he was asking about was still alive, then the person had never chosen to share that fact with him.  I could appreciate wanting to keep that kind of awful personal experience under wraps—I knew a handful of ex-hosts who had never told their families.  And if it was Saddler…

“Nope,” I said firmly.  “Just them.”

He nodded once, as if to himself.  “Okay.”

“Anyway.”  I glanced down at the casserole dish.  “I should probably get all this inside.”

Justin, thankfully, let me escape without asking anything else.

Inside the house (which was already no longer perfectly neat), Mom and Dad were pouring wine from a swanky-looking bottle for the adults and providing sodas for the kids.  I did the full circuit of greetings: pretended to believe Aunt Ellen when she told me how much I’d grown, solemnly listened to Uncle George’s thirty-minute description of how he was doing at work, and made polite stuff up when they asked me how I was doing.  The cycle started over again when Uncle Dan showed up with Jordan and Sarah in tow.  And then again when my dad’s cousins and aunt (don’t ask me how they were related to me; I have no idea) showed up with my great-grandmother.

“Tom, where’s your brother?” Dad asked in between all the greetings.

I sighed.  “What am I, his personal keeper?”

“That was a rhetorical question.” Dad crossed his arms.  “Go get him out of his room.”

Yeah, since it was so _unbelievably easy_ to get Jake to do things he didn’t want to.  Since I’d always had such incredible success at that in the past.  Suuuuure.

“Fine,” I muttered.  At least the attempt would give me a five-minute reprieve from all these people.

Jake, of course, didn’t answer when I knocked on his door.  Or called his name.  Or begged him to come out.

“I’m coming in there if I have to morph and break down the wall!” I threatened.

Surprisingly, that worked.  Jake jerked the door of his room open long enough to say, “No you won’t.”

“You have no idea the things I’m capable of,” I said.

“Uh-huh.”  For some reason, Jake still sounded like he didn’t believe me.

“Mom and Dad want you downstairs.  At least long enough to do one quick round of small talk with everyone.  They’re acting kind of...”  I made a vague gesture.  “You know.”

Jake grimaced.  He did know.  He’d seen as many of their anxiety attacks as I had.  But I could also tell, from the look on his face, that he was about to refuse.

“Please?” I said.  “Just for a little while.”

He looked down.  “There’s no point.  What good would it do?”

I didn’t move.  Honestly, if he’d said _I don’t feel up to_ _it_ or _talking to these people will freak me out too much_ , I’d have dropped it.  As it was, I couldn’t tell if he genuinely thought the gathering was better off without him or if he didn’t want to admit that he didn’t feel emotionally sound enough to face this many concerned relatives.

“It would mean a lot to Dad if you could spend ten minutes saying hello, at the very least,” I said.  “Do you think you could do that?”

Jake shrugged, which was not an answer.

“Jake...” I said quietly.  “I think Dad kinda needs this.”

“Fine.”  He stepped into the hall and snapped the door to his room shut.  “Ten minutes.”

“Thanks.  You gonna put pants on first?”

Jake looked down at the morphing clothes he was wearing, considered for a second, and then shook his head.  “We already know all these people.  Too late for first impressions."

I spread my hands out.  “That’s what I keep telling Mom and Dad.”

We walked into the kitchen.  And stopped.

Everyone in the room turned to look at us.

“Well, if it isn’t the war hero of the hour!” Aunt Ellen exclaimed.

Without a word, Jake turned around and walked back out of the room.  A few seconds later I heard the door to his bedroom slam.

There was a collective moment of awkward silence.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you enjoyed your glimpse of this rarely-seen, oft-spoken-of form of wildlife,” I said into the quiet.  “And please remember, they are easily startled by flash photography."

Uncle Dan gave me a dutiful laugh, and the conversation resumed.

Dad gave a heavy, world-ending sigh.  He leaned back against the refrigerator to polish his glasses on the hem of his shirt.

“I tried,” I said.

He looked up at me.  “You feel like trying again?"

“What am I supposed to do this time, chain him to the radiator?  Zap him with a taser every time he tries to morph and get away?”

Dad looked more concerned than amused, as if he was actually considering whether I was serious for a second there.

I lowered my voice, glancing around the kitchen.  “Dad, he’s not up to it.  Forcing him into this would be cruel.”

“I just...”  He massaged his eyes, glasses dangling from one hand.  “I just want one good day, okay?  Just one good, normal day where everything is actually perfect for once.  Like how it used to be.”

“We’re not how we used to be,” I said softly.  I glanced around the kitchen, but no one was looking at us for the moment.  “Dad, we left ‘perfect’ at the rest stop five hundred miles ago.  And we’re never gonna be  _normal_ , either.  Jake is liable to panic at sudden noises, or new people, or fucking houseflies for some reason.  People keep trying to pick up conversations with me that they last had with my dearly departed parasite.  Mom, it might interest you to know, is currently crying in the upstairs bathroom over something Aunt Ellen said to her about her hair.  But let’s be honest with ourselves that it’s not actually about her hair, or Aunt Ellen.  Well, okay, maybe a little about Aunt Ellen because I have no idea how that woman managed to put away so many glasses of Manischewitz this early in the day—”

“She lost her son,” Dad said stiffly.  “And she’s not coping with it perfectly.”

“Great!” I said, which came out wrong.  “Can’t we just... acknowledge that we’re all a little shitty, and all a little fucked-up, and that that’s okay, as long as we’re not assholes about it?" 

Dad closed his eyes as if trying to draw on some well of inner patience.  “Can you _please_ watch your language around your great-aunts?” 

And apparently now we were dodging the issue entirely.  “Yeah,” I said.  “Fine.”

“Okay.”  Dad took a fortifying breath.  “Okay.  I’m going to go find your mother.”

“Dad?” I said.

He turned back.

“Sorry.  That it’s all so weird right now.  We’ll, uh, adjust.  What was it you said about how brains are great and can adjust to anything?”

He smiled faintly.  “I was talking about yeerk infestation at the time.”

“Right,” I said.  “Bad comparison.  Look, I’ll try, okay?”

“Thanks, kiddo.”

We split off.

An hour into small talk and I was thoroughly ready to go a full year without seeing any of these people ever again.  They kept smiling really hard.  And patting me on the arm.  And telling me about how _absolutely great_ their lives were.  And assuring me that if I wanted to _talk_ about _anything_ then they were _there_.  And then patting me on the arm some more.

The cycle was seemingly endless:

“Tom, how you’ve grown!  How _are_ you?”

“Not bad, and you?" 

“Oh, you know, fine.  I heard about the...” (Here, a significant glance at my forehead as if expecting to spot kandrona residue.)  “That must have been terrible.” 

“Actually, it was loads of fun.  Best experience I’ve had all decade.  You should try it yourself.”

“Wait, _what_?”

“Sorry.  Sarcasm.  Anyway, how’s work?”

Lather, rinse, repeat as necessary.

It was almost a relief when my great-grandmother cornered me and started scolding me for not being a more dutiful son.  I’m not sure what exactly I was in trouble for—probably not being married yet.  Although it could have been the fact that I wasn’t currently employed and bringing in money, or the way my hair was cut, or the sins of my generation as a whole.  There was even an off chance she thought I was Jake or Saddler (she did that sometimes) and I was being scolded for something I hadn’t done.  The whole speech was generic enough—just a lot about my being “a burden to hardworking parents” and “not what a young man should be”—and contained enough Yiddish words that I couldn’t say for sure.

Sadly, Dad saw what was happening and came over to rescue me.  This, after less than five minutes’ worth of not having to contribute to the conversation beyond nodding along with the largely-incomprehensible enumeration of my flaws.

“It was a very busy time for us all, bubbe,” Dad said gently.  “I’m sure he would have been there if he could.”

Great-Grandma sniffed loudly.  “He is young and disrespectful and thinks he is too good to spend Rosh Hashanah with his own family." 

“Oh,” I said out loud.  So _that’s_ what this was about.

Essa 412 had opted out of the celebration last year, that was true, mostly because the trip to Great-Grandma’s place in Carmel was supposed to last over three days.  After Essa had made that little announcement, Dad had looked at me with weary sadness, echoes of the spectacular temper tantrum that had preceded Grandpa G’s funeral in his eyes, and quietly told me that that was my decision and he wasn’t in the mood to fight me on it.

“What is the world coming to when our own children do not keep our traditions?”  Great-Grandma asked Dad, as if he represented the entire human population.  “What have we fought for, died for, persevered for over so many centuries if not—”

“Look,” I said loudly, trying to head her off.  “That wasn’t even me who—”

"It was a long time ago, let's not argue about it now," Dad said over me.  “Sometimes social obligations and schoolwork can cause us all to lose sight of what’s important." 

I turned sharply to look at him, startled and a little hurt. My actual reason for not going was a hell of a lot more legitimate than some measly school day, unlike he was implying.

“I would have gone if I could.”  I paused for a breath and Dad jumped in.

“Tom’s sorry,” he said.  “And it won’t happen again.”

Great-Grandma sighed, nodding at my dad as if they were silently bemoaning Kids These Days with the force of their stare.  "You are young." She patted me on the arm, skin powdery-soft. "But you do have a duty to your family."

"I know," I said patiently. "But I had a—"

"Lot on his mind."  This time Dad actually nudged me with the toe of his shoe.  "You remember what it's like to be young."

I didn't say anything else. I got the message, even if I had no idea why it was being conveyed in the first place.

Dad gave us each a very stiff smile before he walked away.

If Great-Grandma noticed anything she didn't say.  Instead she leaned toward me, smiling conspiratorially.  "Do you have a girl in your life?"

On more familiar ground now, I smiled. "Yes, actually."  I’d even invited Bonnie, but for some unfathomable reason she hadn’t wanted to spend an entire day under excruciating scrutiny from twenty-odd total strangers and had turned me down.  Couldn’t imagine why.

Great-Grandma nodded her approval.  "And she is from a good family?"

A Jewish family, in other words. Which, given that Bonnie's grandparents were Korean Presbyterian and her parents were the kind of whacky hippie atheists who named their daughter "Bountiful Sunshine Park," probably meant they didn't qualify.

"The best," I said firmly.  I walked away before she could say anything else.

I caught my dad leaning against the door to the kitchen, intent in a low conversation with Uncle Dan.

"And how long...?" Uncle Dan was asking in an undertone.

"Three years, a few months," Dad said softly. "Starting sometime in August of '96—he says he doesn't remember exactly when—"

"Thanks for covering me with Great-Grandma," I said over him.  “I really appreciate you making it sound like it was _me_ throwing a shit fit every time you tried to get us to travel for any length of time.”

Dad took his time turning to look at me.  "Tom... Can we just keep things light today?  Is that too much to ask?"

If _keeping things light_ meant blaming me for shit Essa 412 had done, then maybe it was in fact too much to ask.  But he was right that it wasn't worth starting an argument over.  Not here.  Not today.

"Yeah," I said at last.  "Fine."

He smiled at me.  "Thanks.  It’s just that your great-grandmother has been around for a very long time, and—"

And then the doorbell rang again.

Everybody stopped talking for a second while most of us did a quick visual headcount and determined that, outside of Jake, no one was missing.

"Got it!" I walked out of the room.  Anything to get me out of this conversation.  

When I opened the door Marco was standing on the front porch with a cake box under one arm.

“Um,” I said, a little taken aback.

My parents had started inviting Marco to just about everything our family did together around the time his own family had fallen apart with Eva's death.  He had actually been at three or four family reunions in summers past.  But since my mom had seemed as surprised as everyone else by the doorbell and I don’t think my dad would have remembered—or bothered—to tell Marco when and where we were hosting this shindig, that left… Jake.

Even if it was just a matter of "come save me from my crazy relatives," he'd still have had to call Marco.  Huh.  

I mentally filed that information away for later consideration.

“Here.”  Marco thrust the box at me.

Caught by surprise, I fumbled it and almost dropped it.  “What’s…?”

“My mom decided that it would be rude for me to show up without food, so she made those cookies,” he explained.  “Since, y’know, you guys are at constant risk of running out of food and always need more.”

“You mean the little square ones with the coconut?” I asked, peeking under the lid.  

Marco nodded, walking past me into the house.

“I keep telling her she should go into business selling these,” I said reverently.  “I don’t know what the fuck she puts in them, but with a market of loyal consumers who are literally addicted, she could make bank.”

“What, like, buy a cookie, save a war orphan?” Marco suggested.

“Sure.”  I stole one out of the box, taking a bite.  I didn't know how she did that thing with the coconut and the vanilla and the whatever other ingredients, but it was sheer perfection.

Marco rolled his eyes.  “Where’s Jake?”

I swallowed.  “He’s in his room.  If you can get him to come out of there by any means necessary, then you’ll be my parents’ hero for life.”

Marco frowned thoughtfully.  “So when you say  _any means necessary_ …  How attached are you to your door frames?”

“Not at all,” I assured him. 

“Oh good.”

He ran up the stairs, leaving me to carry the cookies back into the kitchen.  No matter what he said, I had faith that Jake’s bedroom door wasn’t about to meet a tragic gorilla-induced end.  Marco tended to be subtler than that most of the time.

And even if Marco did end up also camped out on Jake’s floor while they played video games or whatever, it’d be an improvement over Jake brooding alone while my mom gave herself grey hairs worrying about him and my dad worried about my mom and the whole damn extended family worried about each other.

Mom met me at the door to the kitchen.  “Who was that?”

“Marco,” I told her.  “He’s upstairs now, potentially retrieving Jake.  Potentially plotting to turn them both into fruit flies so that they can escape through an air vent." 

“Your children have such strange ideas about everything,” Great-Grandma said to Dad in a voice pitched to carry.

I looked at Mom.

She looked tired already, her hair a spiky mess as if she'd been running her hands through it, her eyes faintly red.  She started to say something, shut her mouth, and finally gave me a small shrug.  “You’re going to tell me to my face I _don’t_ have weird kids?” she whispered, smirking.

I laughed.  “Never dream of it.”

I set the cookies on the counter, dodged both Aunt Ellen’s questions about what I was doing with my life and Forrest’s attempt to throw rugelach at any moving target, and went straight to the backyard.

Brooke and Sarah were already out there, doing something complicated with two jump ropes and a lot of skipping in place that looked incomprehensibly acrobatic.  It took me a second to register what they were chanting, but when I did I shivered.

“...And the yeerks crawl in!  And the yeerks crawl out!  They eat your brains and they spit them out!  You’ll kill your dog and your best friend too, after the aliens are inside of you...”

“Fucked up, right?”

I turned.  Jordan was sitting on the bottom rung of the ladder to the swing set, watching them as well.  Her expression, and her tone, were tense with anger.

“Definitely not the version of that song I remember from when I was their age,” I said slowly.

She snorted, looking away.

I didn’t even recognize her when she first showed up: not only had she sprouted several inches since I’d last seen her, she’d cut off almost all of her hair and dyed what was left black.  Although I wasn’t about to tell either of them this, I thought the whole effect made her look a lot like Jake had at that age.  Between that and the half-inch-thick fortress of black makeup surrounding each of her eyelids, she seemed to have wandered out of a vampire convention and only accidentally ended up in a suburban backyard.  

We both sat there in silence watching Brooke and Sarah for a while longer.  The new version of the jump rope song had whole verses about getting shot down by Bug fighters, being forced to infest people, and how you couldn’t trust your own mother because she’d as soon kill you as anything else if she had a yeerk in her head.

“Catchy,” I commented.

Jordan glared at me, the expression intensified by all that eyeliner.  “The whole freaking  _world_ is yeerk this, Animorph that.  Doesn’t it ever drive you nuts?”

I wasn’t sure what answer she wanted from me.  “I guess.  I mean, the fact that it happened is a pretty big deal, so people are... reacting.”

She huffed in annoyance.  “You know, a year ago today my life was normal.  Boring.  Not a stupid episode of _The X Files_.”

Must have been nice.  A year ago today I would have sawed my own arms off for the chance at having a boring life.  “Next time aliens invade we’ll make sure no one lets you know until the last possible second,” I said flatly.

“You think I care what you think?” she snapped.

I didn’t bother answering.  This wasn't a _whose life sucks more_ contest.  If it had been Jake killed in the war, if it had been my parents who went from being on coldly polite terms to hating and blaming each other for his death… Okay, I probably wouldn't have responded with excessive eyeliner and hair dye, but I would definitely hate everything to do with the war even more than I did.

I wanted to ask her how she was holding up.  Would have, probably, if I was a few years older and I hadn’t just come from a whole excruciating round of that from well-meaning adults inside.

Instead I sat down next to her on the ground.  “Maybe I don’t care that you don’t care what I think,” I said. 

This time when she looked over at me I think she was caught off guard.  She might have been expecting a whole “it’ll all work out in the end” speech.  I’m not sure.

“I just want it to stop being this way,” she said, voice small.

“What way?” I leaned back against the swingset post. “Shitty?  Screwed up?  Terrifying, until you’re too tired even to be afraid anymore?”

“It’s like, I just want everything to go back to being okay.  But it’s not right, it’s not okay, and I _know_ that that’s a really terrible thing to be thinking, like I don’t want to be sad that she’s gone anymore—“  Jordan’s head was tilted forward and she was breathing in deep, slow gasps.  Trying not to cry.

I lifted my hand to put it on her shoulder and stopped.  Left it hovering there uncertainly, not sure whether I should drop it or not.

God but I wished Rachel was here to be the one to deal with this.

“You’re allowed to be sick of feeling bad, you know,” I said at last.  “It sucks.  And you’re allowed to want to be happy, and to be pissed off that you’re not.”

“I want my life back to being normal.”  Jordan sounded watery and uncertain, but at least she didn’t seem to be actually crying for the moment.  “I didn’t know how good everything was until I didn’t have any of it.”

“I’m sorry that it happened.”  I sighed.  “And I’m sorry that your parents are putting a lot on you while they’re dealing with grief too.”

That got her to look up from the dirt.  “I never said that.”

“Yeah.”  I smiled faintly.  “I just did.”

“They’re just...  It’s not their fault,” Jordan said.  “Mon and Dad didn’t ask for any of this either.”

“What, and you think any of us did?” I said.

Jordan opened her mouth to answer, and then closed it.  And then started to speak again, and stopped again.

I waited her out.

“Sometimes I think maybe Rachel did,” she admitted.  Her voice was a rushed whisper that I barely caught.  “Ask for it, I mean.  You didn’t see what she—The way she _got_ , during the—The battles—”

I knew.  I’d seen.  Been on the receiving end, as a matter of fact.  

“Jordan…”  I stopped, at a loss.  What was I supposed to tell her, that it all kind of balanced out since the planet wasn’t being run by yeerks?  That was the truth, at least in my opinion, but it was an asshole thing to say.

“Oh, _please_ , tell me she’s in a better place now,” Jordan snarled.  “And that you’re _sorry_.  Go _ahead_.”

“Nobody asked for any of this shit,” I said instead.  “But, uh, you still gotta respond to it, you know?  And whether or not anyone made it happen, the only choice anyone had—or has, I guess—is responding in a non-shitty way.  Just saying.” 

Jordan shot me a side-eyed look.  “‘Non-shitty.’” 

I favored her with an emphatic shrug.  “You know, trying to be decent?  Treat others how you want to be—?”

“Sorry I asked.”  She was smiling around the words, though.

“Okay, I guess what I’m saying is that having been hurt isn’t an excuse to hurt other people,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter.”  She jammed the toe of her sneaker into the ground, uprooting a clump of grass.

“Look it’s—sometimes I miss my family,” I blurted out.

“Huh?”

It wasn’t the way I had meant to start out, but I kept going anyway.  “I miss how it used to be, before everything.  I miss stupid shit like trying to teach Jake basketball even though if we’re being honest he’s always going to suck at it.  Or having my mom pack me lunch for school like I was seven, not fifteen.  And it’s terrible, I know, because they’re right there, and I should be happy to have them around instead of deciding that they should change to keep me happy, but…”

Ugh.  This wasn’t coming out right.  I started again.  “I guess what I mean is, it’s okay to miss how things were before.  And it’s okay to hate that it changed.  But if you get too stuck in thinking like that, then you’re not going to be able to adjust.  I’m not saying  _move on_ , because whatever, you can do what you want.  But maybe it’s better if you focus on what’s right in front of you, on handling what’s right in front of your face, than… thinking.”

She tilted her mouth up in a half-smile.  “I’m not supposed to think?”

“Nope,” I said firmly.  “No more thinking.  It’s bad for you.  Rots your brain.”

“That’s sound medical advice?” she asked.

“Absolutely.  Cutting-edge science.”

This time her half-smile made it almost all the way to being a real one.

“I do get what you mean,” Jordan admitted.  “And, thanks, I guess.  It just pisses me off sometimes, you know?”

“Sure.  And it doesn't really help that you can’t be pissed  _at_ anything now all the yeerks are gone,” I said.

She tipped her head back, blowing her bangs out of her face.  “Yeah.”  She gave me a sly look.  “There’s always whale-hunting, though.”

I laughed.  “Pretty sure that’s illegal, but trust me when I say I’m tempted.”

“Ta-DAA!”

We both turned around sharply.  It was Marco, standing just outside the back door.  He gestured proudly to Jake, who was standing next to him.

“Congratulations,” I said dryly.

Jake rolled his eyes.  He still looked like he wanted to find somewhere to hide, but at least he conjured up a half-hearted smile when Marco took a bow.

Forrest ran up to Jake, shoving him in the leg.  “Can you please please please turn into something?”  

Jake blinked.  “What?”

He stared up at Jake, arms crossed.  “Sarah says you can turn into all sorts of stuff.  Birds and bugs and stuff.  Pleeease?  Just one little animal?”

“You know, Tom can also turn into animals,” Jake pointed out.  “Why aren’t you harassing him?”

I stuck my tongue out at him behind the kids’ backs.  He smirked at me.

Forrest gave a put-upon sigh.  “Tom’s not a Nanamorph.  Duh.”

“Well, he’s not wrong,” I murmured.

Jordan, I realized after a second, was blushing.  She’d pulled the ends of her sleeves over her hands and was nervously twisting her fingers through the hem of her shirt.

I looked over at her.  “What?”

“Nothing,” she whispered.

“Okay.”

“It’s just…”  She dropped her voice even more, sliding down to sit on the ground next to me.  “That’s Marco Alvarez.”

“Yeah, I know.  I’ve met him before.”  I looked between her and Marco.  “And so have you.  Several times.”

“Oh my god, you don’t get it.”  She turned away with a huff.

“Yeah, I really don’t.”  I shrugged apologetically.

And then it dawned on me.

“You have a crush on _Marco_?” I said in horror.

She shoved me on the arm hard enough that I almost tipped over.  “Shut up, he’ll hear us.  And anyway, I don’t have a crush on him, that would be dumb.  I just, um…”  She gave me a sly sideways glance.  “He’s cute, okay?  And rich and famous and kind of a superhero.”

“I’ll have to take your word for it,” I admitted.  “But you could do so much infinitely better.”

“I’m not going to _ask him out_ , stupid!”  She rolled her eyes.

At least she sounded younger now than she had ten minutes ago.

“You just want to keep on staring longingly from afar, then?” I suggested.

“Don’t tell him, or I’ll kill you,” she said.

I crossed a finger over my heart.

“You’re so immature,” Jordan huffed.

I raised my eyebrows.  “Thanks.  Really.”

“Anyway, what would you know about boys?” she asked, tone suddenly sharp.  I was getting whiplash from her mood shifts.

“You mean, outside of being one?” I said.  But I knew what she was actually saying.  That I wasn’t a guide, a precedent.  I wasn’t her older sister who dated a guy who lived in a tree and would know all about odd relationships.  I wasn’t, in the grand scheme of things, all that much use.

“That’s different.”  Jordan ripped up a violent handful of grass, and then another.

“I know that there are probably loads of people who want to date you who have way better personalities than Marco,” I said.

Jordan scowled at me.  “Anybody else just shows interest in me because of who my sister is,” she muttered.

“Okay, that?” I said.  “I do know about.”

Jordan stopped mid-rip.  She looked over at me.  “Yeah.  I guess you would.”

Yeah.  I guess I would.  “Have you thought about changing schools?”

“What, and being some _new kid_?”  She made it sound like this was some terrible disease.

“Some new kid in a class where you can be your own person,” I said.  At least she’d stopped murdering our lawn, which might have been a sign she was listening to me.  “It’d be a chance to start over.  To be you if you’d like.  Most people who don’t know you won’t ask your last name unless they’re filling out forms or something, and even then they rarely make the connection.  It’s just a thought.”

She was looking at me with new interest.  “I guess there’s the private school in town, or even my Dad’s place in New York...”  She shook her head, looking annoyed with herself.  “I wouldn’t do that to them.  It’d be too much trouble.  Way too much money.”

“Your mom’s an adult who can take care of herself.  Who is supposed to be taking care of you, not the other way around,” I pointed out.

Jordan’s eyes flashed with anger.  She jumped to her feet.  “Mom _does_ take care of herself.  I just help.  I helped a lot more during the war than _you_ ever did—you were totally useless!”

With that she whirled around and ran away.


	2. Cognizance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warnings this chapter for Marco being a bit of an irreverent jerk and minor original character(s) being very large irreverent jerks.

I flopped back in the grass, not bothering to watch Jordan go. If she wanted to be angry at someone so badly, I probably shouldn’t take it personally. I also wasn’t the poster boy for emotional stability myself, it wasn’t that hard to give her some leeway.

Nobody talked to me for almost fifteen minutes. It was nice.

“Um, Tom?”

I sat up.

It was Brooke. She’d spoken in a very small voice, and was standing several feet away.

“What is it,” I sighed.

“Um.” She was practically inaudible now. She mumbled something, and now I couldn’t hear her at all.

“What?”

Brooke flinched.

Wonderful. I had no clear memory of what the hell she was so afraid of, but I could take a few educated guesses. This was what I got for spending so much time loafing in the back of my own mind while some alien ran my life.

Either way, she was definitely acting like she was expecting me to punch her at any second.

I folded my hands in my lap and tried to look non-threatening. “Can you repeat that?” I said gently.

“Your dog ran off,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, I tried to stop him, but we threw the ball beyond the fence, and then...” She said the rest of it too quietly to hear.

“He’s Jake’s dog, not mine,” I said.

She flinched again. “Sorry.”

I smoothed a hand over my face. At least finding the stupid flea-ball would give me an excuse to avoid any more small talk for a few minutes. “It’s fine. I’ll find him. Just... which way did you say he went?”

She shrugged, still watching me warily.

“Can you show me?” I said. “Please?” I added, when she continued to stare.

Silently she turned and walked away.

Hoping that we were heading in the right direction, I pushed to my feet and followed her.

Brooke glanced back at me every so often, apparently expecting me to jump her from behind, but she led me to the far south corner of the backyard. And then she pointed.

“All right, let’s go.” I walked past her into the O’Keefes’ yard.

Brooke stayed where she was, biting her lip.

“Please?” I said. “Homer likes you better than me. He probably likes just about everyone better than me. It’ll be easier to get him to come back if you’re along.”

She glanced one more time back toward the house, but then she followed me.

“Why doesn’t he like you?” she asked in a whisper.

I rolled my eyes. “Same reason as everyone else: something Temrash 114 did.”

Brooke glanced up at me, and then away. “Who’s Tem—Temra—?”

Then again, maybe she hadn’t gotten the same “Why Your Cousins Are Fucked In The Head” talk that their parents had so obviously given Justin before they got here.

“Yeerk,” I said, continuing to look around for Homer. We’d made it through three backyards, but we were also working off the assumption (not necessarily a good one) that he’d continued to travel in a straight line after he’d disappeared from sight. I looked back at Brooke, who was trailing several steps behind me. “Do you know what a yeerk is?”

“They’re aliens from outer space that aren’t nice like the hork-bajir but they stole a bunch of hork-bajir and that’s why the hork-bajir on the news always look mean even though they’re really nice,” Brooke recited.

“Um, yeah.” I turned slowly in a circle, looking for any sign that Homer had been through the yard we were currently invading. Hopefully he hadn’t gotten too far, or we were going to have to resort to going back to the house and getting Jake or Marco to track him down by scent.

“Hey, look!” Brooke pointed to the soft dirt of the flower beds up against the Wallaces’ house. There was a line of paw prints that looked to be the right size curving through the dark soil and around the front of the house.

“Well look at you, Nancy Drew,” I said.

For a second Brooke looked wary like she thought I might be mocking her, but slowly she broke into a smile.

“Anyway,” I said, continuing to follow the line of paw prints, “Temrash 114 is a yeerk. Who stole me. And did a lot of mean stupid terrible things with my body, and then gave it to some other yeerk who was also a total assh—Um, awful person. So now Homer, who is a dog and can’t exactly tell the difference between the real me and the yeerk-controlled me, figures it’s probably best to stay away from me, period. Unless he thinks I have food. Or something he can fetch. Because, like I said, he’s a dog. His world view is not that complicated.”

“That’s dumb he changed what he thinks of you because of what a yeerk did,” Brooke said, without the slightest hint of irony.

At least she wasn’t walking ten feet away from me anymore.

The dirt that Homer had tracked out of the Wallaces’ flower bed and onto the sidewalk led us in an arc back toward the house before sadly running out.

Brooke and I looked at each other. “Maybe I should just go get Jake,” I said.

“Maybe,” Brooke said. She glanced over at me slyly. “Or you could morph something?”

“Nothing useful,” I admitted. “We need a dog or a wolf, something that can track scents.” Even as I talked I turned in a slow circle, looking around. Brooke imitated me.

“There!” She pointed.

Sure enough, there was a familiar patch of tan fur visible through Mrs. Gruen’s bushes. Homer had apparently circled back; even now he had his head buried in a boxy shrub, butt sticking out and tail waving in the air. Probably because the scent of Muffins Episode I was all over the place.

“Thanks,” I told Brooke.

I jogged quickly back toward Homer before he could decide to wander off again.

“Homer, c’mon!” I called. “There are lots of perfectly good things to smell back at the house.”

Homer pulled out of the bush, turning to cock his head at me.

“Come _on_ ,” I said.

I walked toward him—and as soon as I was within a few feet, he danced back several steps. I walked forward again and he pranced backward again, always staying just out of reach.

I glanced over at Brooke. “Told you so.”

“Homer,” she called in a much sweeter voice. “Homer, come here.”

Tail wagging again, he ran toward her. I tried to grab his collar as he went by, and he dodged.

“Hooommmmeeeer.” Brooke tried again.

He thought about it, and then pranced backwards again.

I crossed my arms. “Do I look like Jake to you? I’m not playing this game.” Even as I spoke I took a slow step forward, and then another.

All that got me was another impudent tail wag.

Before he had time to move I lunged forward, grabbing his collar quickly before he could dodge again. Homer, not done being a pain in the butt, promptly rolled over onto his back and almost tipped me over when I refused to let go.

“Fine,” I said. “We’ll do it your way.” I simply scooped him up, wrapping one arm around his back and tossing him part way over my shoulder.

Homer huffed loudly, annoyed at being outmaneuvered for the time being. But at least he had the sense not to try to jump to the ground. That probably would have ended with us both faceplanting into the grass.

Brooke giggled, probably because I looked ridiculous.

When I straightened up, Mrs. Gruen was standing on her back porch watching us. Mrs. Gruen was the sort of person one would never dream of addressing simply as “Hannah,” no matter how much of an adult one technically was. She was more like the sort of person one would end up automatically addressing as “ma’am.”

“What are you doing?” Mrs. Gruen said sharply.

Brooke snapped her mouth shut, immediately sliding sideways until she was halfway behind me.

“Sorry about that,” I called. “We were just retrieving the stupid animal from your yard.” I patted Homer on the rump for emphasis, which got me a faceful of tail wag.

Mrs. Gruen just stared at me.

“He figured out how to get through the electric fence at some point when we were all... away,” I explained. “Keeps wandering off even now that we’re back. One of these days we’ll find out how he does it.”

“I don’t want any trouble.” From her pose—one hand gripping the porch railing and the other arm wrapped around her middle while she watched us with wide eyes—I was guessing she was afraid of dogs.

“Sorry,” I said again, shifting to hold Homer more comfortably. “I don’t think he actually, uh, went anywhere in your yard, but if he did I’ll be sure to clean it up—”

“I’m just a normal law-abiding person and I don’t want any trouble,” Mrs. Gruen snapped.

I froze. It wasn’t the dog she was afraid of.

Suddenly I was very aware of Brooke’s small hand resting on my lower back. She shouldn’t have to hear this.

She shouldn’t have lost her brother to some kind of alien nonsense, either. She shouldn’t be saddled with a last name that had become a curse and a sideshow and a source of morbid fascination, while we were at it. There wasn’t anything I could do about any of that, though.

If Jordan ever figured out where _normal_ was located, I’d like to move of us all there and never leave.

“I know who you are, don’t think I don’t.” Mrs. Gruen’s voice was still higher and louder than necessary, like she was speaking to a whole audience over my shoulder.

“Makes sense,” I said, deliberately dodging the issue. “Since I’ve lived in this neighborhood my whole life.”

Mrs. Gruen leaned forward. “You hear me? I know what you people are.”

“Yeah, I...” I trailed off, not even sure where that sentence was going. If there was a time and a place for this conversation, it wasn’t while I was struggling to hold onto seventy-odd pounds of grumpy, squirming golden retriever as a skittish nine-year-old clutched the back of my shirt hem.

“You’re Jake Berenson’s brother. The host for that yeerk visser.”

“Pisces,” I mumbled.

“What?”

I took a deep breath, trying to remain calm for Brooke’s sake rather than Mrs. Gruen’s. “I’m also a Pisces,” I explained. “A righty. A former Eagle Scout. A mediocre baritone and an excellent point guard. B-average student. Morph-capable human. Straight but curious. I’m allergic to pineapple, I can type fifty words a minute, my favorite color’s navy blue, and one time I scored a three-pointer from half-court with two seconds on the shot clock. Not that anyone cares.”

That, at least, got her to frown in confusion.

I let it drop. “I’ll just... go now, okay?”

She narrowed her eyes. “I’m just an ordinary law-abiding person. Not involved in any of this alien stuff you and your kind brought here. This used to be a nice neighborhood, you know. This used to be a nice town.”

“Yeah, well I guess that was before all the young people started experimenting with alien infestation.” As always, I took refuge in flippancy. “But you know how we kids are with our whacky fads. This year it’s yeerks, next year it’ll probably be another disco revival.”

Homer made another bid for freedom over my shoulder. I hastily tightened my hold on him.

“I’m keeping an eye on you, you hear?” Mrs. Gruen said. “You and your whole family.”

“And I’m sure we’ll all sleep better at night knowing that you are,” I said graciously. With that, I spun around and walked out of her yard. I could feel Brooke still clinging to the back of my shirt, which I guess was an improvement over being scared of me.

Mrs. Gruen muttered something loudly to herself as I walked away, but I determinedly didn’t hear a word of it.

It took until we were back out on the sidewalk for Brooke to let go of me, looking up with a clear question in her eyes.

“The usual.” I conjured a small smile. “She’s annoyed with me for something that someone else did with my body. Possession is nine-tenths of my identity.”

Brooke’s forehead scrunched in distress. “You should have let Homer poop in her yard.”

I laughed, feeling a little better already.

“Anyway, how come _Jake_ gets random strangers asking him to sign their stupid cleavage or hold their stupid screaming babies and I only ever get crap like that?” I asked Brooke mournfully. We continued to trudge down the sidewalk, attracting a few glances thanks to the useless furball draped over my left shoulder. “Maybe _I_ want to sign people’s boobs and kiss their babies, but noooo. No one ever thinks of me. And I bet _Jake_ doesn’t get people treating him like a freak or accusing him of lying. Like he’s so special.”

Homer, who probably would have been unsympathetic to my whining even if he had been able to understand a word I was saying, responded by burying his wet nose into the back of my neck and falling asleep.

“Why do you want to sign _boobs_?” Brooke asked.

Ugh, I should learn to censor myself around small children one of these days. “With any luck, you’ll eventually figure that one out on your own,” I said. “In the meantime, take my word for it that if you end up straight you’ll be missing out.”

“Yeah, okay.” Brooke rolled her eyes, clearly just appeasing me in my weirdness.

I trekked back to our backyard, stopping to unclip Homer’s collar before we walked over the electric fence. Jake was sitting on the ground talking to Sarah, so I simply went over to him and plopped Homer down in his lap.

Jake looked up at me, expression questioning.

“Keep an eye on him, would you?” I asked. “Or I’m donating him to a horse food factory.”

That earned me identical scandalized looks from Brooke and Sarah.

Jake just rolled his eyes and said, “That’s not how that works, dumbass.”

Sarah gasped. “You said a bad word!”

Homer woke up and Jake’s response was lost in a violent round of licking. As always, Homer was so ecstatic to see him that you’d think they had been apart for years.

Typical.

“Is it just me, or are we the weird neighbors now?” I asked.

“What, did the—Homer, chill!—did the Murrys move out?” Jake said.

“Nope.” At least, I didn’t think so. “But I think we’ve officially achieved a greater level of weirdness than the Murrys.”

“You guys _are_ super strange,” Brooke added.

Which, if I thought about it, made a kind of sense. Between Jake’s seeming inability to leave the house without flying out a window, my own tendency to bounce a basketball in the driveway at 3:00 AM when I couldn’t sleep, and the fact that Mom had made a valiant attempt to paint over the dracon burns on the front of the house but had not really succeeded in concealing the melted siding, we were sort of weird. Also, you couldn’t turn on the news these days without seeing archive footage of Jake doing something with aliens, so that probably didn’t help our case either. The Murrys just owned too many ferrets and talked your ear off about how dragons fit in the Bible, which was practically tame by comparison.

“Don’t worry.” Sarah crossed her arms. “Our family’s weird too. But Mom says that’s okay, and that I’m allowed to punch anyone who asks me too many questions about Rachel.”

Jake sighed. “I wish I could do that.”

“Ask your mom,” Sarah suggested pragmatically. “She might let you.”

I wandered off. And made small talk. And tried not to stab myself—or anyone else—in the eye with a fork.

There was no guide for this, no precedent. No one had written the self-help book on what was normal and what was strange, on the kinds of things to expect or avoid. Families went through hell, yes, and many of them knew what it was to lose people and be twisted by it.

And yet, I wasn’t sure anyone had gone through quite what we had. We’d all been changed by it, changed in strange and frightening ways, right down to Homer and his newfound fondness for running straight through the electric fence any time an interesting scent caught his fancy. And no one quite understood. Many of them were dealing with even worse crap, so no one was asking them to.

Eva got it, at least a little, I think. She knew what it was to come home to a battle-hardened family that saw her face and thought of the enemy. But it was still different for her: she had died. The wound she’d left behind had been enormous and unhealing, but at least it was clean. At least she’d been remembered, and mourned.

At least someone had noticed she was gone.

My exit had not been so neat, had not been accompanied by flowers and a headstone and an obituary in the local paper so that everyone would know to stop looking for me. Instead I had been a ghost wandering our home: silent, watchful, intangible, but still relentlessly present. Restless and angry and unable to find the eternal rest I craved.

And then, strangest of all, I’d been reborn. Thrust into the sort of frightening new life where objects moved when I touched them, where my voice spoke aloud with the power to help or to harm. Mostly to harm. I was out of practice being real, being visible and able to touch.

It was practically miraculous when my phone rang an hour later.

“Sorry,” I told whichever great-aunt was currently talking to me. “Gotta take this, it’s from work.”

Technically it was sort of true. Bonnie had done some consulting for Eva and I over publicity matters. Once.

“Hey, you,” Bonnie said. “Any murders yet?”

I laughed, cradling the phone against my ear as if I could hold her that way. “Nope. Just the usual drama. You want to adopt a golden retriever?”

“I don’t think my building manager allows pets.”

“Damn.” I walked around to the side of the house, sliding down to sit on the ground with my back pressed against the siding. “I was going to offer you Jake next, but that would be like adopting a whole menagerie.”

She laughed. “If it’s any consolation, my parents are over right now and they’re the reason I’m hiding in the bathroom talking to you.”

“Oh no. What is it this time?”

“Well, they felt the need to ever-so-casually look through my cabinets to make sure I’m eating right,” she said in a whisper. “And then it’s all ‘oh, Bonnie, but you told us you were allergic to instant oatmeal!’”

I closed my eyes, letting my head rest against the wall. “Wow. Seriously?”

“Yeah.” She made a noise somewhere between a sigh and a growl. “There are times when I think I need to draw them a chart, map out exactly who has been who the entire time. Make one column for each of us: Nikto seven-seventy, Akdor four-eight-seventeen, yours truly, Sub-Visser-I’m-so-special...”

“You shouldn’t have to do that for them,” I said softly. There was something terrible to consider about the idea of Bonnie being only one-seventh of a chart. As if each person who had used her body had an equally legitimate claim, even though we both knew that wasn’t the case. “Your parents should know. Or at least they should figure it out.”

“Yeah, well, _should_ and _do_ are not the same thing, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I can tell you apart from some yeerk,” I said. “And I went on like three dates with Nikto seven-seventy.”

“Which is why I plan to keep you around,” she said fondly.

“Good, because I plan to stick around.” I kept my eyes closed, trying to block out everything but her voice. Everything but _her_. “I assume ‘eating right’ means ‘no chemicals but the _right_ chemicals’?” I asked.

“You know, Tom,” Bonnie said, in a passable imitation of her mom’s voice, “Post-Infestation whatsits is just a state of mind. If you eat organic and avoid phosphates, then you too can be a real boy. Why, my friend Martha’s aunt’s reiki instructor’s next-door neighbor _cured_ her PTSD by getting rid of phosphates, so I see no reason why you can’t do the same!”

“Remind me again,” I said, smiling now. “Does marijuana count as a chemical, or a state of mind?”

“Marijuana is _transcendence_ , and the government only wants to keep us from having it because if we did then we’d know the truth!”

We could laugh about it, sure, but there was a reason Bonnie had moved out of her parents’ house so soon after the war ended. They meant well, of course, but they also didn’t believe in SSRIs. They tended to think that Bonnie was overreacting to the whole yeerk thing, that when she said “you had a completely different person living in your house for almost four years,” what she really meant was that yeerks had been a bad influence on her personality for a while but she was over it now.

“Few more hours, right?” I asked her. “Then you can get rid of them for the next several weeks.”

“I’m counting down the minutes.” Bonnie laughed, the sound tired. “Anyway, I should probably go and face the music before they think I died in here.”

“All right. Take care of yourself. Call me again if you need it?”

“You know I will.”

“See you tomorrow, yeah?”

“If we both make it. See you then.”

She hung up.

When I wandered back around to the front of the house, the family had spontaneously started in on one of those randomly-timed meals that were a usual hallmark of a large gathering. This one was happening at about two-thirty and seemed to involve mostly various types of salad. There would probably be another one at about seven-thirty that had hamburgers and bits of all the pasta salad and fruit salad and tossed salad and random-cabbage-stuff-that-might-have-been-salad salad left over from earlier in the day.

I filled a plate and found an empty spot near the end of one of the picnic tables Mom and Dad had dragged into the backyard almost three days ago.

To my surprise Marco plunked down at the picnic table directly across from me. "Did you know that your great-grandmother doesn't believe in yeerks?" he asked, expression intent.

I shrugged. I hadn’t known, but now that I did it explained a lot. "She also thinks that the 1969 moon landing was faked and that Communists put fluoride in the water to suppress higher brain functions and make us unprepared for when the USSR launches a nuclear attack."

“And that doesn’t bother you at all?” Marco said.

I knew what he was actually asking about, but I smiled and said, “I’m pretty sure we could survive the outbreak of nuclear war by turning into cockroaches. So, no, not really.”

Marco narrowed his eyes at me. “Your own grandmother. Thinks you’re making stuff up.”

“Oh man, is Great-Grandma _still_ mad about Rosh Hashanah?” Jake dropped down next to Marco.

I smiled faintly. “Hey, somebody’s gotta do the hard work of disappointing every single one of our ancestors since before the dawn of recorded history, and goodness knows you’re not doing very well at it.”

Jake frowned. “Did you try explaining to her?”

“No such luck. Apparently she doesn’t believe in yeerks,” I said.

Jake blinked. “Wait, _what_?”

Marco threw up his hands in indignation. “That’s what I said!”

“Doesn’t... _believe_... in _yeerks_ ,” Jake muttered, like this was the strangest idea he’d ever heard. Like I’d just said that Great-Grandma didn’t believe in the existence of water, or dirt.

“Plenty of people don’t believe in the existence of aliens,” I said. “It’s a perfectly valid point of view. Widely accepted, even.”

They both stared at me.

“Your sarcastic voice sounds a lot like your normal voice,” Marco said at last.

I sighed. “Yeah, I’ve been told that.”

As a matter of fact that hadn’t been sarcasm. A whole subset of the population genuinely didn’t believe that any of the ex-hosts were telling the truth about yeerks. The list included celebrities. Political leaders. Medical doctors. Average schmoes off the street. Scientists. Grandmothers. People debated both sides of the issue on CNN like it was a political controversy with two equally legitimate interpretations.

The war had happened all at once to a lot of people, and the details had to seem awfully suspicious from the outside: there had been aliens attacking, but they were gone now. The aliens were invisible because they were hiding inside people’s brains. The primary person explaining all this alien stuff to the world was some kid who also had known connections to Hollywood, with all its special effects and conspiracy theories. It was all very convenient.

“Maybe Great-Grandma’s going senile.” Jake looked worried.

“She is kind of old,” Marco said solemnly.

It occurred to me for the first time that, for all the obnoxious publicity and pervy fan mail they had to put up with, there were some ways in which Jake and Marco had been insulated by their own posterity. Because of course, even the most hardcore denialists usually stopped short of calling a war hero a liar to his face.

Sadly, I had no such distinction.

“She’s never seen an alien with her own eyes so she has no reason to think they exist.” I stabbed a tiny fried potato with my fork, and then stabbed it again. “That’s the way it works.”

“So there’s some vast conspiracy where everyone all over the news is lying to her?” Marco demanded. “And so are you?”

“More or less, yeah,” I said.

Jake glanced toward the house, and then back at me. "But _why_?"

"We all know the kinds of things teenagers will say to get attention,” I said tiredly. “It’s this generation’s version of claiming to be controlled by Satan in order to get out of criminal convictions. There's some disagreement going about whether it’s mass hysteria or outright fraud, but Occam's Razor—"

"I seriously can't tell if you're being flippant or if you have genuinely lost your marbles," Marco said.

I wanted this conversation to be over. “I’m not arguing against the existence of yeerks. Obviously. It’s just that a lot of people think that way. Might as well let them continue to be wrong, because it’s not worth arguing over.”

“I think it’s worth arguing over,” Jake said sharply.

I shrugged. "I think she’s an eighty-three-year-old Holocaust survivor and can therefore say whatever the hell she wants.”

“So what?” Marco said.

Jake gave him a long, patient look.

He clearly thought about what he’d just said, and then cleared his throat. “I didn’t mean it like _that_. I just meant that she’s been through some crap, but that doesn’t actually give her the right to nullify anyone else’s crap just because it makes her uncomfortable. Just because your awful shit is worse than anyone else’s awful shit, that doesn’t mean you, like, win a competition where now you get to blame the other person for their own awful shit.”

“That’s not the same...” I sighed. “Look, I didn’t even get involved in the war. Not on purpose. It just happened to me.”

“Yeah, and unless your great-grandmother was a Nazi, she’d probably say the same thing about World War II,” Marco said.

“For that matter, it’s not like we went out looking to get attacked by aliens either.” Jake spread his hands. “We were just in the wrong construction site at the wrong time.”

“I...” I found I didn’t have an answer for either of them. I’d never really thought of it that way before.

Of course what had happened during our war couldn’t compare to what had happened during hers... and yet maybe Marco was right, and comparing wasn’t the point. After all, no one was going around refusing to acknowledge the differences between her and some yeerk.

“You’re seriously telling me that you don’t care at all that your grandmother thinks you’re responsible for...” Marco tilted his head at me. “ _How_ many murders, exactly?”

My right hand flinched shut, sense memory of tiny bones cracking still buried somewhere under the skin.

Jake kicked Marco under the table. It was probably meant to be subtle.

“Look.” Marco made a gesture in the air with his plastic fork. “I’m just saying. It might be worth talking to her. Challenging her pretty little worldview that has to make everybody else look bad to avoid her having to think too hard about anything. Because you deserve to get acknowledged. You deserve to stand up to her for who you are. You should be able to look her in the eye and tell her the truth. And yeah, she’ll probably keel over from a heart attack in surprise, but at least she’ll learn something before she dies.”

Jake buried his face in his hand. “You have the most unique inspirational speeches,” he mumbled into his palm.

“That’s what we kept you around for.” Marco patted him on the arm. “That and your stunning good looks to put on the recruitment posters.”

“Hi guys what’s up!” Jordan sat down across from Marco. She had fluffed her hair and was currently making a huge show of being more interested in her black-painted fingernails than our answer to that question.

“‘Up’ is a meaningless concept outside of a localized gravity field,” Marco deadpanned.

“That is so profound,” Jordan said.

Marco shrugged. “I stole it from Ax.”

“Let me guess,” Jake said. “That was his attempt at a sense of humor.”

“Who can tell?” Marco said philosophically.

“I, um.” Jordan tossed her hair off of her face in a way that was probably meant to look carefree. “I saw your television pilot.”

Marco brightened instantly. “Most parts ever played by a single actor in a single episode of television.” He touched himself on the chest as if asking us all to admire him.

“What parts did you play besides Nick whatshisface and that suspiciously helpful osprey in the last scene?” Jake asked.

“I was the horse in the fifteenth-century flashback, the ominous crow that warned Agatha of her impending death, the fly on the windowsill that was a metaphor for Laurent’s trapped existence, the loyal cocker spaniel that Benjamin murdered when he discovered he was a fallen angel, and the blue jay that herded the other blue jays into pretending to attack the incredibly beautiful actress whose sole role in the episode was to have her skirt fall halfway up as she died,” Marco listed smugly.

“And to think, you turned down a spot on _Touched by an Angel_ for the ultraviolent trashy action show,” I said.

“The way you can channel my mom's spirit straight through your own body is just uncanny,” Marco said solemnly. “That's a real talent you have there.”

I tilted my head, sliding into a voice had Eva’s rapid high-pitched inflection and traces of a Spanish accent. “There is far too much profanity in that script for someone your age. Just think of all the children who will be watching. And didn't I tell you to cut your hair before filming any of your human appearances?”

Marco threw a grape at my head. I dodged, and it sailed over to land in Uncle Dan’s drink.

“Sorry!” Jake yelled on our behalf.

Uncle Dan gave us all a suspicious look, then turned back to the conversation he was having with my mom.

“Anyway, if it makes you feel better about your own batty ancestors, my dad’s parents still think my mom is dead,” Marco said. He propped his chin on his hand, rolling his eyes.

“Couldn’t your mom just, like, show up at their house?” Jordan asked.

Marco widened his eyes until he looked half-crazy. “These days, what with the morphing and the controllering and all, _anyone could be anyone_ ,” he said. “Who’s to say she didn’t just die five years ago and this new person is an imposter?”

“So your mom is some other person in morph?” I said.

“No.” Marco’s tone suggested he was explaining a simple concept to a small child. “Obviously, Visser One is pretending to be her in order to steal my dad’s money.”

I dissolved into helpless giggles. That was a hell of a mental image.

“Okay, no offense,” Jake said, “but that is even crazier than believing the war never happened.”

“Believing _what_?” Jordan said sharply. “Who thinks that?”

“Loads of people, according to Tom,” Marco said. “Apparently it’s all the rage now to pretend that aliens don’t exist as long as you can blame it on a bunch of kids making stuff up. Either that or we’re all whacked in the head and—”

Jake was making _shut-up_ motions. It wasn’t doing any good.

“—we just want people to get in on our delusions so that we can have an excuse for all that property we destroyed,” Marco finished.

 _Crack_.

Jordan slammed her glass down on the table so hard that the whole surface jumped. “So, what?” Her voice had gone terrifyingly high-pitched. “None of it matters? It might as well not have happened? Rachel died for _nothing_?”

“I never said that.” Marco’s voice was very small.

Jordan shoved to her feet. Her entire face was red, and she looked ready to start throwing punches as soon as she found an appropriate target.

“You want to know what Rachel died for?” I said.

Jordan whipped around to look at me.

“Little planet known as Anarres, fifth from its sun, next galaxy over.” I folded my hands on the table, hoping she wouldn’t attack me. “Has somewhere in the range of four hundred thousand inhabitants, all peaceful. They look kind of like flying blobs of spaghetti, they farm hydrogen—don’t ask me how—and Visser Seventeen would have taken the Blade ship and crashed over that planet like a forest fire hitting a paper factory, if not for what Rachel did.”

Jordan hadn’t punched me yet. Instead she was staring at me with her mouth half open. I chose to take that as a good sign.

“And you want to know the part that’ll really bake your noodle?” I said. “None of them know who she is. None of them ever will. The planet Anarres will keep right on spinning on its track, full of free beings going about their boring hydrogen-farming lives, until it falls into a black hole, and no one on it will ever know that that’s only the case because of some blond-haired alien with attitude problems. But it doesn’t matter, because it’s still true. They’re all still alive and free because of her, and knowing about it doesn’t make a difference. And all of this—” I made a gesture to take in the whole backyard. “Is because of her. I’m not a controller right now. Nor is your dad. Nor are my parents. Nor are any of these weirdos we have the great misfortune to be related to.”

“I’m not a controller either,” Marco added.

I turned to look at him.

“Just thought I’d get that out there,” he said. “Since I’m not related to you guys.”

“Anyway,” I said. “The point is, we’re all here now because of her. That’s real. And thinking you can make it any less real by denying it happened? That would be like trying to turn off the sun by closing your eyes and humming really loud any time someone tries to tell you it’s still there.”

When Jordan came at me I stiffened, expecting an attack. But all she did was grab me around the middle. After a second I figured out that actually this was a hug, not a somewhat clumsy attempt at strangling me. I patted her awkwardly on the shoulder—which had the unintended consequence of causing her to burst into tears.

I shot Jake a panicked look over Jordan’s shoulder. He shrugged, looking to Marco for help.

When Jordan sat back on her section of bench, scrubbing angrily at her eyes with the back of her hand, Marco handed her a napkin and said, “It’s a manhole cover.”

“Huh?” Jordan said wetly. Her eyeliner had spread to cover even more of her face.

“Or a manhole that doesn’t have a cover.” Marco frowned. “There’s this ginormous deep hole in the middle of the street, and sometimes you succeed in walking around it, and sometimes bam!” He slapped a hand on the tabletop. “You fall right in.”

“What does this have to do with Anarres?” Jake asked.

“And sometimes you find yourself so worried about the next time you’ll fall that you can’t use the street at all,” Marco said over him, “and sometimes you feel guilty for all the times you do manage to dodge it. And then the weirdest thing of all happens, after you get better at dodging even though it takes years to do so. You find yourself at a party telling people about how this one time you fell down the manhole and broke your ass, and it’s actually funny. And that’s not a bad thing. It just means you incorporated it. You didn’t pave it over, you didn’t fill it in, you just learned to live with it.”

Jordan was watching him intently.

Jake frowned. “You mean...”

Marco grinned suddenly. “I mean you should always pay your taxes. Because otherwise you get crap like open manholes because the municipal employees can’t afford to keep the streets repaired.” He made a gesture in the air as if trying to wipe away everything he’d just said. “Manhole covers. Good for society, good for everyone.”

“That made perfect sense to me,” Jordan said slowly.

“Excuse me.” Jake stood up. He walked away, apparently not looking where he was going. He didn’t appear to be headed anywhere.

Marco looked after him, and then back at me. “Is he okay?”

“Is any of us?” I said.


	3. Iatrogenesis

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warnings this chapter for irresponsible uses of alcohol and victim-blaming like whoa.

I stood up myself, leaving Jordan and Marco to each other's company and walking inside. I glanced around for Jake as I went, but there was no sign of him. My guess was that he’d morphed to sneak in his own window so that he wouldn’t have to walk through the crowded minefield of a kitchen.

Mom was currently taking absolutely everything out of the refrigerator in an attempt to tetris the various casserole dishes into place and get the door to shut. I propped up a leaning tower of tupperware for her, getting a grateful smile in return. We worked in silence for a few minutes, until—

“What was it Tom was saying this time last year?”

I turned around sharply. It was my Aunt Leah, or maybe Leah’s sister Elizabeth. She was technically my great-aunt so it wasn't like I saw much of her. But she was standing next to Leah’s husband Joe, so that was an educated guess.

“Oh, you mean that whole bit about how no one cares about honor or courage until everyone who fought against you is already dead,” Uncle Joe said. “Yeah, yeah, and that when you get right down to it, what wins wars is strength, not—”

“I never said that.”

I’d spoken loudly enough that Joe wasn't the only one who turned to look at me.

Taking a slow breath, I walked over to them. My expression was neutral. I think.

“Oh, sorry, was that Jake?” Aunt Leah smiled apologetically, turning to include me in the conversation. “My mistake, we're always mixing you two up—”

“It wasn't me, or Jake.” I looked from one of them to the other. “It was a yeerk called Essa 412, pretending to be me. Don’t put words in my mouth. Especially not words that _thing_ said.”

“Oh gosh.” Aunt Leah laughed nervously, expression loose enough that I guessed the glass of wine in her hand wasn’t her first, or her third. “Sorry, we always have so much trouble keeping up with who's up to what in this family.”

“Then I'll try and make it real simple.” I tried for a polite, pleasant tone. “You have not had a conversation with me in over three years. So. How’ve you been?”

Aunt Leah exchanged a look with Uncle Joe. Probably because I’d sort of missed the mark on pleasant, and had actually slipped into a tone better described as hostile. Or having-my-teeth-pulled.

“What were you doing at the time?”

I turned to look at Uncle Joe. “Huh?”

“You must have been doing _something_ when they chose you for one of their yeerks,” he said earnestly. “I mean, they didn't just take random teenagers off the street, right? So there must have been something.”

And there went all my righteous indignation. It felt like it’d been sucked out through my gut with a shop vacuum, along with most of my insides. I focused on breathing, wondering if I’d actually just flushed with shame or only felt like I should. “I walked into the back room of a Sharing meeting.”

Aunt Leah frowned in confusion. “And there weren't signs up or anything?”

Unable to look her in the eye, I stared at the wall behind her. I should have just kept my trap shut. “There were,” I confessed, words grinding through my teeth. “I ignored them. I thought it wouldn't be that big a deal at the time.”

Uncle Joe laughed. “Guess that sure showed you, huh?”

Well, at least they couldn’t see anything on my face. They couldn’t tell. The hot wave of humiliation filling my throat and blocking off all air didn’t translate to so much as a tremor in my lips.

“Guess it did,” I said dully.

“Aliens,” Uncle Joe said, shaking his head. “Crazy stuff, man. Back in my day we always expected first contact to be those little green guys from television, not _inside your brain_.”

How disappointing, then, that my own _first contact_ had been blundering on a secret meeting and getting my sorry ass kidnapped.

“Like something out of _Star Trek_ , only real,” Aunt Leah said. “Although I don’t think Star Trek ever covered... How do you fit an entire alien inside your skull, anyway?”

Not comfortably. “Probably in all the space leftover from my tiny brain rattling around,” I said instead.

They both roared with laughter like this was the wittiest thing they’d ever heard.

It was then that Dad tapped me on the arm.

“Mind if I borrow him for a minute, Leah?” he asked.

“Go on, go on.” Leah smiled. “But give him back eventually. He was just telling us about those yeerk-things and the philosophy of wars...”

“Still not me who said that,” I mumbled.

They both laughed like I’d done some impressive trick.

“Can you not?” Dad said in an undertone.

I turned around, smiling coldly at him. “Can I not _what_?”

“You know what I mean.” He’d taken several steps back from Leah and Joe, forcing me to step away to hear him.

I continued to look innocent. “Nope, I really don’t.”

Dad breathed in and out slowly. “Please, Tom. Just for today. Can you not talk about all this alien stuff?”

“Dad.” I crossed my arms. “You had a yeerk inside of your brain. Do not lie to people about that. Please. For love of God. And don’t ask me to lie either.”

“I’m not asking you to do anything of the sort.” Dad was still speaking very quietly, glancing around us in case anyone could hear. “It’s just that your great-grandmother is a very elderly woman, who has been through a lot of difficult times, so—”

“So we’re all supposed to treat her like a child so that nothing disturbs her tiny universe?” I demanded. “How is that respecting her?”

Dad stiffened. “I don’t think it’s that much to ask for you to have some awareness of manners, and respect for other people.”

It was at that point that I quietly and thoroughly lost my temper. “I’m sorry,” I said, voice very loud. “I know this must be incredibly difficult for you. After all, let’s be honest about the fact that you always liked Essa four-one-two better than me. And if he was here now, then you can  _bet_ I wouldn’t be talking about yeerks in front of everyone.”

Dad’s eyes went wide with hurt. “That’s not true. You know that’s not—”

“Dad, Dad.” I was still maintaining that falsely bright tone, even though my hands were shaking. “My ears were working just fine, even if I couldn’t communicate worth a damn. I heard all those times when you told me how much more _mature_ I’d gotten, how the Sharing had been _such_ a good influence.”

He put a hand on my arm and stared forcibly steering me out of the room. I gave a cheery wave to everyone who was staring at us on my way out the door.

“It must be so rough for you, having that old disappointment of a kid back,” I drawled as he dragged me halfway down the hallway. “You know, the _shallow_ one, who only cares about basketball and girls instead of _giving back to the community_. So trust me, I understand why you’d rather I went back to being seen and not heard.”

Dad didn’t answer for several seconds. Finally, when it became clear I wasn’t going to say anything else, he opened his mouth. “Are you done?”

I considered. “Yeah, I'm done.”

He started to say something else—and then stopped. He took his glasses off and started rubbing at them again, even though he was always telling his own patients never to polish glasses with the hems of their shirts. The whole time he wasn’t looking at me.

“Dad...?” I said quietly.

“If you want to go, you can.” His voice was rough. He was on the verge of tears.

Shit.

Shit.

“You’re right. I shouldn’t be doing this to you if you don’t want to be here. I just thought...” He cleared his throat, still looking down. “That just for today we could focus on moving on, and not...”

Suddenly it was hard to remember what the hell I’d been so angry about a second ago.

I opened my mouth. There didn’t seem to be words. There wasn’t air with which to say them. I shut it.

Dad cleared his throat again. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make it like this.”

The memory hit me then: Essa 412 watching the human-controllers herding the crowds of screaming, struggling people into the train cars headed for the yeerk pool during the last desperate weeks of the war, and seeing my dad through the crowd. Dad’s body had straightened up, both arms holding a thrashing girl who couldn’t have been more than twelve years old but was still putting up a hell of a fight. Even as Essa had idly watched, my dad’s hand had come down on the side of the girl’s head in a sharp, precise motion that caused her to drop unconscious with brutal speed. From there the yeerk had simply thrown her bodily into the train car, not bothering to look where she’d landed.

Our eyes had met, and his chin had dipped into a quick nod. A soldier acknowledging a superior officer, nothing more.

It was obscene, what had been done to him. What the yeerks had used me to do to him. Twenty years ago he’d taken an oath to do no harm, and he’d _meant_ it. All my life he’d been infinitely patient and kind, rarely raising his voice even when Jake and I had been running around jumping off fences and nearly burning the house down with bottle rockets.

Whatever the hell the yeerk had done to that kid, it had done with information from inside my dad’s mind. Most human-controllers couldn’t have slammed a kid’s brain against the inside of her skull with just one precisely-aimed tap like that. They’d taken all the things he taught himself about how to help humans over a decade’s worth of schooling, and they’d used him for _that_.

And now here I was, whining because Dad didn’t particularly feel like dwelling on those memories. Because when he said _back to normal_ a selfish part of me bristled at the implication that _normal_ meant when I’d been docile and silent and helpless. Of course that wasn’t what he meant at all. Of course not. I could see that for myself, if for once in my life I looked beyond my own hurt indignation and remembered the pain other people had gone through.

“Dad,” I said weakly.

“I’m sorry, Tom. For not being there for you. For failing you as a parent at the time when you most needed my protection.” He dug in his pockets.

I handed him a cocktail napkin.

“Thanks.” He sniffed hard. “That’s not what this is about, though, is it.”

“Not really,” I said. “I just... Dad, I can’t get away from this shit. No matter how hard I try. All I ever did was wander into some stupid back room at some stupid nonprofit meeting because I had a stupid crush on a girl. That’s _it_ , I swear. I don’t _want_ this crap taking over my life. But that doesn’t stop other people from watching me any time I go to the store because they’ve seen footage of Visser Seventeen on the news, or talking to me like I’m five years old when I get stressed and start mumbling, or following me around to take pictures because they know about Jake.”

Dad was crumpling the napkin like he didn’t know what it was for.

“And...” I made a small sound that was meant to be a laugh but didn’t come out that way. “And I’m sorry that all this shit rewired me. That I don’t even fucking know how to be normal anymore.”

“Tom...”

“And, and that’s how it is,” I said. “I’m a weird, kind of fucked up kid. Even if I am more normal than half the assholes in there.” I gestured back toward the kitchen.

Dad was silent for a little while, and then he snorted.

“What?” I said.

He looked up at me. His smile was watery, but it was definitely there. “I missed you, you irreverent little brat,” he said. “Even when I didn’t know why I was missing anything. You got your shallow from me. And your pragmatism from your mother. Let’s be honest that that _mature_ kid was downright boring.”

I smiled, ducking my head.

“And I’m proud of who you are now.” Dad took a step forward. “You’re a fighter. A survivor. Even if I don’t know _where_ you learned to curse like that.”

“Aliens made me do it,” I said. It was a particularly unfunny bumper sticker that had experienced a massive uptick in popularity in recent times.

Dad took a deep breath, visibly battling against the urge to express his disapproval.

“Seriously, though.” I cleared my throat. “Spirit of full disclosure and all: it started out as a way to annoy Temrash one-fourteen. Kinda got in the habit after that, even though Britney Spears tunes worked way better on Essa four-twelve.”

Dad raised an eyebrow. “Britney Spears?”

“No appreciation of the finer things, that one.” I grinned at him.

His smile had gone oddly soft. “You know, with your mom it was Barry Manilow?”

“Barry Manilow?” I repeated slowly. “Mom has memorized enough Barry Manilow to set his songs on a mental loop?”

He held up both hands as if to excuse himself from answering. “She has hidden depths.”

“Sadistic, terrifying-as-fuck hidden depths.” I shook my head. “Did you ever...?” I stopped. It was a personal question, in some ways the most personal question. A part of me didn’t want to know, just in case he hadn’t fought back at all, had never made the effort...

Dad shrugged. “Never hurts to rehearse the periodic table of elements every once in a while, say...” He frowned thoughtfully. “Forty or fifty times a day. Just to stay fresh, of course.”

“Okay, you win for monotony.” I laughed incredulously. “Alahar three-eighteen must have fucking _hated_ you.”

“I did my best.” Dad looked halfway embarrassed, but a little proud of himself as well.

“Steve?”

Uncle George had poked his head into the hallway. Given the scene I’d just made, I think he was surprised to find Dad and I leaning into each other, grinning conspiratorially.

“Sorry, yeah, what?” Dad said.

“Just...” Uncle George glanced at me. “Seeing how you’re doing.”

“We’re fine.” Dad smiled. “We were just talking about, uh...”

We glanced at each other. It was one of those things that you really couldn’t explain to anyone who hadn’t experienced it: how good it felt to needle the yeerk, even knowing the yeerk would probably come back with a sledgehammer. One of life’s small pleasures, when everything else was gone.

“Talking about earworms,” I said.

Dad snorted.

“Okay...” Uncle George waited for either of us to elaborate, and, when we didn’t, slowly backed into the kitchen.

“Look, kiddo, I know this is hard.” Dad turned to me, expression more serious.

I shrugged. “I’ve survived worse.”

That one didn’t get a laugh out of him. “Think you can get through another few hours of talking to everyone?” he said.

No. “Yeah, okay.”

“Great.” He put a gentle hand on my arm, and just left it there for a few seconds.

“Dad...”

“Few more hours, okay?” he said. “Aliens or no aliens.”

“Yeah, I can do that.”

He kept his arm on me, nudging me back into the kitchen.

I compromised with Dad and with myself by remaining in the kitchen but devoting myself wholeheartedly to rearranging the refrigerator and freezer until every single dish fit inside comfortably. That gave me an excuse to smile and nod at people and occasionally pass them the frozen knishes but never actually have a real conversation. All of that careful arranging got me through until the meal that wasn’t quite dinner, at which point I had the joy of pulling out all the dishes I’d just spent so long putting away and setting the table the most thoroughly it had ever been set in its life.

In addition to the random bits of salad, someone—and I was pretty sure it wasn’t Mom or Dad—had conjured a roast turkey from somewhere. The table now had that centerpiece, a bowl of chicken-broth mashed potatoes, a teetering pile of asparagus on a paper plate definitely not meant to be a serving bowl, and six or seven different types of alcohol.

Dad swept by me with an illogically large bouquet of wine glasses held by their stems in both hands, looking hassled once more.

“Can I have a beer?” I called after him. It was as much a forgiveness offering as a genuine request; I’d been asking for one on every year this occasion since I was about ten years old, and it had become something of a tradition over time.

I wasn’t actually expecting him to respond, much less with what he’d said the last eight or nine times.

“No.” He didn’t look up from where he was struggling to balance all the wine glasses on the tabletop without dropping any. “Because if I let you have one then Saddler will want one, and if I let Saddler have one then Rachel will want one, and if Rachel gets one then Jake—” He cut himself off midsentence.

One of the wine glasses slipped out of his hands. It didn’t break, instead hitting the carpet with a small _thud_ and rolling out of sight under the table.

Suddenly our little in-joke seemed to have opened a festering sore in the middle of the room.

“I come bearing plates!” Marco announced, parading into the room with a huge stack in his arms. “I am the plate-bearer, and you all shall worship me.”

Leaving Dad to his wine glasses, I grabbed half of Marco’s stack and started distributing them. The room filled as I did so, people serving themselves and then sitting down because anything else would have been unmanageable. Everyone seemed to have crowded into the room except Uncle Dan, of whom there had been no sign for several minutes now. Once we had a mostly full house and everyone had seated themselves in front of plates, Great-Grandma spoke the traditional words over the food. Blessings done, we all reached for forks.

And then Jake stood up.

“I know I haven’t been the baby of this family for a while,” he said, glancing at Brooke and Forrest. “So I hope I’m not stepping on any toes here...”

“Step away,” Jordan told him.

“Thanks.” Jake cleared his throat. “I just wanted to say that I’ve neglected studying any of this for... for a while, but I do know there’s a lot of talk in the Torah about escaping slavery. And about how afterward, there’s some necessary adjustment. Wandering. How it doesn’t just end there. How the price of freedom is the blood of the firstborn, and how even freedom isn’t always a solution. But I’m still grateful for what we have.” He looked slowly up and down the table. “And I want everyone else to know where we came from, and to be grateful too.”

No one said a word, even in the pause that followed. Jake at his most intimidating could make war-princes cry, top-ranked vissers beg for mercy, and people like us forget what an incredible dork he was the rest of the time.

“Jordan’s right,” Jake said. “Rachel died fighting the yeerks. Died so that we could live without fear. I’m not dishonoring her memory by refusing to talk about how she died, or why. And if anyone has a problem with that...” Shifting tactics, he scooped up his glass of water and held it up. “Here’s to us, okay? And here’s to the people who made sure we could be here.”

He drank. Most of us drank with him.

To my surprise, Marco murmured something that sounded like agreement before crossing himself, and then he briefly bowed his head over clasped hands.

Jake sat down, and—after a second of tense silence—everyone started eating. Mom leaned across the table to rest a hand on his shoulder. “I’m proud of you, honey,” she whispered.

He bit his lip, looking down. When he looked up, it was at me. His eyes were imploring, his mouth half-open. Silently asking me if what he’d done was okay with me.

I smiled. And then I lifted my own water glass, tilted it pointedly toward him, and took a long drink.

Most of dinner passed quickly, since I deliberately asked Aunt Elizabeth (or possibly Aunt Leah) about her opinions on California’s power grid and let the avalanche of anger carry itself from there. The food was even pretty good; it made a nice change not to eat Mom’s cooking.

Not that she didn’t try hard, I thought quickly, and not that I wasn’t grateful for all she did. And I appreciated that not everyone’s mom made home-cooked meals at all, and really there were one or two things she was actually pretty good at, and it wasn’t so bad really that she didn’t believe in salt, she was just trying to do what was best...

Realizing that I was justifying myself to an absent yeerk, _again_ , I cut that train off right there. I smiled at my own stupidity. It was okay; I was alone. I admitted it in the privacy of my own head: Mom wasn’t a great cook. I was an ungrateful disappointment to my ancestors.

“What’s funny?” Aunt Elizabeth asked.

I shook my head. “Not people’s electricity bills right now, that’s for sure.”

She drew herself up. “Exactly! And that’s another thing...”

It wasn’t until everyone was trying to clear away plates at once—and making a huge mess in the process, since there were too many of us for not enough labor—that Great-Grandma cornered me again.

“Steven says that I must be more open-minded,” she said.

I waited, not responding. I wasn’t even sure if she was talking about the conversation Dad had had with her earlier, or if he’d caught her again since then.

“He says that I do not know everything...” She paused meaningfully. “And perhaps he is right. You are you and that is enough. You are unique, and I think that that is all any of us can be, ourselves. Which you are.”

“Uh, thanks.” _I think._ “Bubbe—”

“It is good that you are with us once again,” she said firmly.

Caught off guard, I didn’t come out with an answer. By the time I got my mouth working again, she’d walked off to go scold Uncle George for his haircut in the other room.

People started trickling out after dessert: first Aunt Leah and Uncle Joe, then Great-Grandma, then Marco. I stole the rest of Eva’s cookies from him, but he didn’t seem to mind at all.

“Uh, Tom?” Justin tapped me on the arm.

“What's up?” I asked.

“It's...” Justin lowered his voice, glancing around. “It’s Uncle Dan.”

I did a quick glance around the kitchen myself. Yep, he was still missing. “Where is he?”

“Upstairs.” Justin jerked his head to indicate. “And... I think he's, um. I think he’s been drinking.”

Well, if he was intoxicated enough that a fourteen-year-old could tell that at a glance, he was probably _very_ drunk. “Okay,” I said slowly, “I'm probably not the best person to deal with that. Why don't we talk to Great-Grandma or someone.”

“Well,” Justin said, “It's just... he's talking about _yeerk stuff_.” These last two words were said in a conspiratorial whisper.

I went upstairs.

“First line of my resume,” I grumbled, checking in the rooms one by one for signs of drunk idiots. “‘Deals with yeerk stuff.’ Probably what people say about me. ‘That Tom, he sure deals with yeerk stuff.’ On my headstone. ‘Here lies Tom. He was the guy to call to deal with yeerk—’ Shit.”

Uncle Dan had apparently decided that the floor of the bathroom was the place to make his final stand. When I opened the door, he just lifted his head halfway, mumbled something I didn’t understand, and dropped it again. He hadn't brought any alcohol with him, thank goodness, but the whole room still reeked like a brewery.

“Hi.” I crossed my arms, leaning against the door frame.

“Wha’re you d’ng here?” He glared at me, somewhat unfocused.

“Justin was worried about you.” I tried to enunciate, as if to compensate for his lack of vowels. Ex-host-mumble plus alcohol-slurring was not a good combination—I was mostly guessing as to what he’d just said. “So I'm here to get you a glass of water, maybe some coffee, maybe some bread, and then drive you back to your hotel room. Whether Jordan and Sarah are leaving with you or going straight back to Aunt Naomi kind of depends on how much you decide to start acting like an adult in the next several minutes.”

That at least got him to sit up a little more and focus on me. “I can do whaever th’ hell I want,” he said slowly. “Y’ can' make me do a’ything.” The grin that spread over his face was dopey with alcohol. “You can't make me do _anything_ I don' wanna do.”

I sighed, halfway amused despite myself. I knew the feeling. “You’re not wrong. Still, I’m going to go downstairs and find some graham crackers and a glass for water, and when I get back—”

“I don’ even like gr’m crackers,” he said petulantly. “‘n I don’t care what you think. I can do whatever I want, and I’m gonna.”

“Yeah, I’m getting that sense.” I rolled my eyes, turning toward the door. “Fine, then. Saltines. Matzo. Something with starch, depending on what I find in the kitchen.” Also, at least one of my parents.

“Can’t tell _me_ wha’ t’do, Vissher S’venteen.”

I whipped back around, moving before I had time to think. My left hand was already clenched around a handful of his shirt and my right was raised in a fist before my higher brain functions caught up with what my emotions were doing. Uncle Dan was staring at me with his mouth half-open in surprise, actually focusing on me for the first time.

With effort, I lowered my hand a few inches. “I have had a really _fucking_ long day already,” I said through my teeth. “And I don’t _feel_ like dealing with your bullshit. I’m going to go downstairs and get my dad, who _just to be clear_ also should not have to deal with your bullshit, and who has also had a very long day. If you even think about calling him ‘Alahar three-eighteen’ then I am going to show you a thing or two Visser Seventeen taught me about how to break a human skull into pieces with my bare hands. Are we clear?”

Uncle Dan’s eyes had gone very wide, darting between my fist and my face. He nodded fractionally.

I released him, suddenly fighting the urge to sit down next to him and burst into tears. I was so sick of—of everyone. And everything.

Instead I turned around, walking out of the room. I was halfway through charging down the stairs when I encountered my dad coming up, a bottle of water tucked under his arm.

“Justin told you?” I said.

He ran a hand through his hair, looking exhausted. “Yeah.”

I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry.”

“Why?”

“Because today kinda sucked,” I said. “And you worked hard to make it not suck. And apparently we all suck enough anyway that it didn’t make a difference.”

Dad stepped up a stair, pulling me into a hug. I clumsily returned it, wrapping my arm around him as he squeezed onto me for a few seconds. The water bottle was squashed uncomfortably against my left hip, but being able to lean my head against my dad’s shoulder like a little kid more than made up for that.

“You don’t suck, kiddo,” he murmured. “Nor does anyone in this family.” He stepped back, huffing a small laugh. “Well, I remember every year why I only talk to Ellen once a year, but other than that...”

I smiled faintly.

“We’re gonna be okay,” Dad said.

“I’ll...” I cleared my throat. “I’ll get Jordan and Sarah home to their mom, yeah?”

Dad took a deep breath, but decided against whatever he was going to say. “Thanks,” he told me instead. “I appreciate that.”

I nodded. At the top of the stairs he turned left, heading for the hall bathroom. I went right, stopping for a moment and leaning against the wall. Wishing to be different. To be better. For Dad’s sake. For my own.

“C’mon, Danny, up and at ‘em,” Dad was saying softly, audible through the still-open bathroom door.

Uncle Dan’s response was too mumbled for me to catch it.

“Yeah, I know,” Dad said. “I know.”

This time Uncle Dan spoke more clearly. “She’s _gone_. She’s gone and she’s gone _forever_ and... And she was gonna... And and instead they took her...” The rest was lost to weak sobbing.

“Okay, Danny, okay.” Dad sounded exhausted. “Okay.”

Their voices faded together, until it was hard to tell one from the other.

“So,” Jake said, and I jumped. He was sitting in the window seat at the end of the hall, and I hadn’t even seen him.

“So what?” I did my best to turn and focus on my own little brother. Dad’s conversation was none of my business.

Jake raised an eyebrow. “So if _you’re_ hiding up here being antisocial, and _I’m_ hiding up here being antisocial, and _Dad’s_ hiding up here... doing whatever, then who’s driving the ship right now?”

I glanced toward the small slice of kitchen visible through the second-floor bannister, and then back at where Jake was curled in the window seat with both arms around his knees. “Presumably Mom,” I said. “Although there is a slight possibility that all four of us are currently hiding upstairs and the monkeys have taken over the asylum. Jury’s still out.”

“Yeah, but what I’m really getting out of this conversation is that I’m not going back downstairs.” Jake gave me a tiny approximation of a smile. “Possibly ever.”

“Can I borrow your car?” I said.

He blinked. “Uh, yeah, okay. Why?”

“I’m driving Jordan and Sarah home. Uncle Dan is, um, he’s...”

As if to punctuate my sentence, there was a loud retching sound from the hall bathroom.

“Probably spending the night here?” Jake suggested delicately.

“Yeah, most likely.”

Jake twisted, reaching for pockets he didn’t currently have—he was still dressed for morphing, the dork, you’d think he didn’t even own real clothes—before realizing that he definitely didn’t have his keys on his person. Sliding down from the window seat, he poked his head into his room. Wherever he looked, he was out a second later. “I think my keys are down in the kitchen,” he said. “You know, where there are still people.”

“Is that your way of telling me to go get them myself?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“Coward,” I told him, and he grinned.

I gave the hall bathroom a wide berth on my way back downstairs, although there was really no blocking out the fact that Dad and Uncle Dan were still talking about Rachel. Thankfully the kitchen was mostly empty when I made it back downstairs; everyone had shuttled off except for Mom, Jordan and Sarah, and one couple of great-uncles (or something—I couldn’t tell you how we were related) who were even now kissing my mom’s cheek in farewell.

Jordan and Sarah were at the kitchen table, playing what looked to be gin rummy. They made an odd contrast, Jordan with her fuck-you eyeliner and black armbands, Sarah with her golden curls and periwinkle sundress. As she watched Jordan shuffle, Sarah was absentmindedly clutching at the heavy gold pendant she wore around her neck. Judging by Jordan’s occasional worried glance at her sister’s hands, this habit was a new one.

After she’d finished shuffling, Jordan set the cards aside and looked up at me. “We’re going back to Mom’s house tonight, aren’t we?” she asked quietly.

I opened my mouth to answer her and found I had no words. She was so old in that moment, so weary and ancient and accepting of her own inability to change the world, or even the way people behaved.

She looked a hell of a lot like Jake. And it wasn’t just the hair.

“But I wanna stay here with Dad!” Sarah announced. “He promised he’d be in town for three whole days this time. He _promised_.”

Mom swooped in at that moment. “Okay, kiddo, let’s get you ready to go. You can see your dad—” She glanced at me and I shook my head sharply. “Tomorrow morning. In the meantime, do you want me to do your hair before you go?”

Sarah looked between all three of us, clearly on the verge of tears. Jordan was jamming the cards back into their box so hard she was bending the cardboard. In that instant, I understood why Aunt Naomi hated my entire family for having sided with Uncle Dan following the divorce.

It took a little more cajoling from Mom and Jordan both (I went to pull the car out, like a coward) but we got Sarah bundled into the backseat and ready to go with minimal drama. Jordan was plenty old enough to ride up front, but slid into the back with her sister.

We drove in silence for the first few minutes, outside of Jordan telling me how to get to the place her family had moved into after Bug fighters had annihilated their old house.

And then Sarah said, “I still don’t get why we can’t stay with Dad.”

“He can’t take care of us right now.” Jordan sounded frayed with exhaustion.

“Why not?”

“Because he’s stuck on his own crap.”

“You’re just saying that!” Sarah accused. “You just don’t like Dad! I know you don’t!”

“I like Dad just fine.”

Even I could hear the lie in Jordan’s voice that time.

Sarah took a catastrophically huge breath. “If Rachel was here, she’d let us stay with Dad!”

Jordan made a small wounded sound in the back of her throat.

“Would she?” I asked.

“Shut _up_ ,” Jordan muttered.

“Sarah,” I continued. “Would Rachel actually want you guys to be stuck in some hotel room while your dad has to worry about other things? Or would she want to make sure you’re taken care of and your mom isn’t lonely?”

“I hate you too,” Sarah said, which I was pretty sure was her way of signaling I’d won the argument.

“I’m _sorry_ , okay?” Jordan burst out so suddenly I jerked the wheel. “I’m sorry I’m not her! I’m sorry I don’t know how to paint your nails right and I’m sorry I can’t make a damn French braid and I’m sorry I can’t turn into a horse and I’m sorry I suck at everything because I’M NOT RACHEL! There, are you happy?”

“I don’t want you to be Rachel.” Sarah’s voice was tremulous with tears. “I want you to be _you_. And you’re not. You’re no _fun_ anymore.”

There was ringing silence from the backseat.

I considered intervening again. And then I considered whether it made more sense to pull over in case they needed more time.

In the end I just kept driving.

“I don’t mean to be no fun,” Jordan said at last, much more quietly now. “I just...”

“You never do my nails at all anymore,” Sarah said. “And you never want to watch _Buffy_ with me, and you never do anything. I don’t like doing stuff all alone with Mom all the time. She’s no fun either, and she’s always been no fun.”

Paused for longer than was strictly necessary at a stop sign, I snuck a glance at the rearview mirror. Jordan was chewing hard on her lower lip, seemingly fighting for words; Sarah was watching her imploringly.

“I’m sorry I said your manicures are dumb,” Sarah ventured. “I take it back.”

Jordan cleared her throat, finding words with audible effort. “I could show you how to do them with a Sharpie. Then we wouldn’t end up with paint all over your fingers like last time.” She made another small coughing sound. “No one else in third grade has a black manicure, right?”

Sarah gasped. “Then I’d be _cool_ ,” she whispered. “Like Spike. Or Drusilla!”

“Yeah.” Jordan took a deep breath. I caught a motion out of the corner of my eye; she was running her hands through her cropped hair. “I’ll show you tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay,” Sarah said. And then, “thank you.”

I turned onto their street, counting off houses until I got to the fourth one on the right. It was nice, even painted a similar shade of mint green to their old place, although it was clearly newer and less lived-in than their old house had been.

Mom must have called ahead, because Aunt Naomi was standing framed by the open door as we pulled up. I saw her draw back sharply when she registered Jake’s car—and then relax a little when I stepped out to open the door for Sarah and Jordan. She even gave me a small, stiff nod of recognition.

Well, at least there was one person on the planet who liked me better than Jake, I thought with a touch of dark amusement. Even if it was a matter of her hating my guts slightly less than she hated those of everyone else in my family.

Sarah ran from the car toward Naomi’s arms, flinging herself forward. “Mom Mom Mom! I ate popsicles and I played jump rope and Marco turned into a bird because Brooke asked him to a bunch of times and Brooke said it was the grossest thing she’d ever seen and I said I’d seen grosser and I won the argument and Aunt Jean let me keep some of her hair barrettes and they’re sparkly all over and Aunt Jean says that Dad says he’s gonna stay _three whole days_...”

Jordan climbed out more slowly, looking after her sister with a fond smile that had an edge of melancholy. She started to walk away when I caught her gently on the arm.

“Call me,” I said. “Yeah?”

She frowned. “I...”

“I’m serious,” I said quickly. “Any time, any reason—’s not like I sleep regularly anyway. Call me at three in the morning to tell me about your latest crush, interrupt me in the middle of the afternoon to complain about your parents, I don’t give a damn. I just... Please. For my sake. I’d feel so much better if you would talk to someone.”

She opened her mouth to respond, moistened her lips, and looked down. When she lifted her head back up, there were bright tears filming her eyes. “Okay,” she whispered. She bit down on her lower lip over any more words, nodding silently.

“Thank you.”

Clumsily she threw her arms around me, squeezing me around the middle hard enough that I could feel her arms trembling through my aching ribs. Gently I slid an arm over her shoulders, holding her back.

She stepped back almost immediately, awkwardly rubbing one hand over the opposite wrist. I suppose hugging—and crying, for that matter—broke her aura of aloof antipathy too much to do it for long.

“Take care of yourself, yeah?” I said. “Worry about everyone else second.”

Jordan shrugged. “Yeah, whatever.”

Turning more slowly, she took a second to look at the ground and sniff firmly. By the time she lifted her head up, she had a bright smile for her mom, her mannerisms almost as open and cheerful as Sarah was being. I left her to it, somehow sadder because of that smile than I’d been on seeing her tears.

The drive home was silent, oddly peaceful within my bubble of light moving through the darkness around. I tried calling Bonnie again on the way home, but there was no answer; I’d catch her tomorrow.

When I pulled up, the house was dark except for a single low light illuminating the front stoop. My dad sat in the pool of light, forearms resting on knees, looking up at the sky. I shut the car door softly, part of me reluctant to disturb his meditative silence.

It took Dad several seconds to react when I walked over and sat next to him, but eventually he remembered himself enough to glance over. “Dan’s kids get off all right?” he asked.

“Oh, uh, yeah. I guess.”

He reached across the stoop to the cooler resting against the bottom stair, pulling out a gleaming jewel-green bottle of Heineken. Twisting the lid off barehanded, he started to raise the bottle—and then, with a sound that was half-sigh and half-laugh, handed it to me instead.

“Thanks,” I said softly. Tilting the bottle back, I took a long pull. My consolation prize was bitter and sharp with carbonation, but the aftertaste was surprisingly sweet.

Dad made an absent-minded hmmmming noise of acknowledgement, fishing back into the cooler and pulling out a second jade-glass bottle for himself.

We sat in silence for a long time. We were idly watching the frentic halo of bugs that circled the porch light, fleeting and incandescent as shooting stars.

“Tom—”

“Yeah?”

Dad paused, considered, and started again. “We're gonna be okay,” he said at last. “Eventually, we'll figure out what okay looks like, and we'll get there.”

I cleared my throat. “Y’know, the whole lot of us might not be perfect, and we're never gonna be normal again, but... yeah. Okay. We can be okay.”

We stayed out there for nearly an hour, waiting for _okay_ to sound like _enough_.


End file.
